Most people commonly refer to the Internet as the World Wide Web, or Web for short. The Web uses multimedia (graphics, text, sound, video, etc.) to connect people to information on global scale. The Web has evolved from simply connecting people to people, or people to servers, to connecting servers to servers. Servers connect via web services that provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. The phrase “web service” is defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, www.w3c.org) as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Those web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility, as well as their machine-processable descriptions thanks to the use of XML. They can be combined in a loosely coupled way in order to achieve complex operations. Programs providing simple web services (or simply referred to as “services”) can interact with each other in order to deliver sophisticated added-value benefits.
Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by using a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages, for example the SOAP protocol, over a computer network. SOAP messages are typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. Using standard W3C XML schemas, UGS Corp. created PLM XML to be an emerging format for facilitating product lifecycle interoperability using XML. Unfortunately, however, the PLM XML schema is not entirely supported by any of the major SOAP stack vendors.
What is needed is a custom serializer/de-serializer so that a PLM XML document can be marshaled/un-marshaled into lava Objects for processing regardless of SOAP stack vendor.